Marea Stamper, aka The Blessed Madonna, is a DJ and producer based in London.
Marea Stamper, aka The Blessed Madonna, is a DJ and producer currently based in London, but born and raised in Kentucky. Earlier this year, for the Talkhouse Reader’s Food Issue — out now digitally and in print — Marea spoke with us about how growing up in Appalachia shaped her relationship to food.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music
We wouldn’t have the United States if it weren’t for the resources that come out of Appalachia: salt, coal, natural gas, timber. All of those are things that come in great volume from the part of the world where I’m from.
Appalachia covers a wide swath of a region — I think it’s 13 states — but the important thing to note about the Appalachian Mountain range is that, while some areas are flatter and more appropriate for farming, a lot of the food that’s available is the kind that you find in areas where the land is maybe not easiest for farming. In Appalachia, there are honest-to-god food deserts. It was a big deal when Wal-Mart came, because there were just things that you couldn’t get. That’s what it was like in my era, but my grandparents lived through the Depression — which was like Depression+, because they were so geographically isolated. When my grandma was a little girl, she had a little brother who had some kind of nutritional disorder that by all means could have been solved with access to fresh fruit and vegetables. Every day, my grandmother and her sister would walk miles and miles through the mountains to get to the one store that was there, to see if there was an orange or an apple or something. Over and over again, there was nothing, and so her brother didn’t make it. He starved to death. I think that food means something different if the people who changed your diapers have experienced someone starving to death.
That said, I grew up in a world where food was absolutely wonderful. My grandmother cooked anything. I wouldn’t even call all of the dishes she made particularly Appalachian, but some of them were. There’s one called wilted greens: You take some kind of greens (usually the first greens that come up when it’s cold outside, like kale), and then you fry up a bunch of bacon, dump the grease on the greens, and salt them. The greens are softened on the spot. Then there are dishes you see that are very common in the UK and Ireland. The relative that really brought one side of my family over was a Jamestown bride — she was sold off to cook and clean for someone in Jamestown. So you have these recipes that come straight out of County Cork and end up in Eastern Kentucky. There are many dishes that fall into that category. Of course, in Ireland and England, the tomatoes were not quite as beautiful…
My grandfather on my dad’s side was what was called a county agent, and he would teach farmers how to not overextend their soils and rotate their crops. We got a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables that would make the likes of city farmer’s markets tremble in jealousy. And some weird things that I think people would probably make people go, “Eugh.” A lot of poor people food really terrifies people.
I don’t have to make any grand case to say that the notion of the hillbilly as sort of a slack-jawed, stupid clown is something that is still totally fine to make fun of in America. I went to school in Lexington and Louisville, and even still inside Kentucky, I knew very much that what I was eating was not the same as what the kids around me were eating. Even if I wasn’t eating something that had a sign over it blinking, “Hey, there’s a hillbilly here!” — just the fact that I didn’t have things in my lunchbox that other middle class kids with health insurance had was such an indicator. I was on free lunch; we were on food stamps and WIC. There was a real deep shame that was forced upon me, and even my mother, for needing it. I can remember my mother going to the grocery at night so that no one would see her using food stamps.
There are some things that you carry with you and internalize, and some of that, for sure, is what kind of food you would eat in front of other people. We have some real winners. I probably wouldn’t eat pickled baloney in front of other people. The way that you get it, it just comes out of this massive jar, and you cut off pieces of it. It’s fucking awesome. We also have these jars of bright red pickled eggs, and these things called hot sausages — which, they aren’t really that hot, it’s more like buffalo chicken hot. They used to come in a little bright red jar of brine, and they are so good. Penrose makes them, and they were discontinued forever, but they just started making them again. Just over Christmas, I went home to inter my grandparents, and we stopped at a gas station on the way to Somerset, Kentucky, where I bought their burial plot. I found Penrose sausages in the convenience store! They were not in the jar — they were individually packed — but nonetheless, we swooped them up. My papaw loved them so much, so I left one on his gravestone for him.
We’re at a moment where we’re starting to see some of the things that people would have been icked out about that now are becoming things that people want, in the era of tail-to-nose fine dining. The gentrification of food is one of those things you hear a lot about, but most of the people who are doing fine dining Appalachian stuff are hillbillies. If they want to go for it, bless ‘em. I’m just happy to have one more restaurant to get a decent biscuit in.
Also, particularly with the landmark cookbook Victuals by Ronni Lundy and Johnny Autry — they did not miss a step. It’s an incredible book. I received it not long into lockdown, and I went through and started cooking the things in it. It was such a revelation for me. There were things that I had not tasted since I was a child. Some of the foods felt like a seance. My dad is dead, and the particular thing I would flag are his soup beans. They’re pinto beans with pork, salt, pepper — sometimes you would cheat and add a little extra ham bouillon in it, which really is delicious. It was not complicated to make, and eating it was like eating with the ghost of my father. It is a special book, and it meant so much to me to be able to try to make those things for the first time.
This food may become gentrified, but you know what? Most of the stuff just grows out of a rock. It’s not like there’s anything real rare going on here. If people want to get really into heirloom tomatoes, god bless ‘em. I’d love to be able to get one in England. If someone can figure out how to gentrify that right over here, I’d be just delighted.
As told to Annie Fell.
